Editorial: Full reporting of opioid overdoses is urgent

Published 12:00 am, Thursday, March 8, 2018

When is the last time you heard of someone dying from chicken pox? Since a vaccine became available in 1995, deaths from the once common disease are rare (only three in the United States in 2012).

When is the last time you heard of someone dying from an overdose? It’s likely you either know that “someone” or know a connection, a friend of a friend.

In Connecticut last year, more than 1,000 people died from a drug overdose and numbers are climbing so far this year. As throughout the country, opioid abuse is considered an epidemic.

Yet health officials in the state have no solid information on the number of cases because opioid overdose is not on the list of conditions for required reporting to the state Department of Health.

Chicken pox and some 80 other conditions must be reported, but not one of the leading causes of death.

This outdated practice is wrong, and must be fixed.

The only statistics in Connecticut come from the state Medical Examiner’s office, which is woefully overworked because of the tsunami of overdoses. Those numbers are deaths, but nowhere is information collected statewide on the instances of overdose victims who survive.

This statistic is important to know not only for the practical means of obtaining federal grants, but also for the general understanding of the scope of the problem.

It would seem easy enough to add opioid overdoses to food poisoning and West Nile virus on the list of what must be reported to the state health department. But the Department of Public Health Advisory Committee failed to add the overdoses to the list, because of concerns about the best practices to gather the data, despite the pleas of local health district leaders.

More urgency is needed. The General Assembly’s Public Health Committee intends to raise a bill in the coming weeks to address the data collection oversight. We urge the members to follow through all the way to adoption by the full assembly.

The opioid epidemic — which knows no geographic or class boundaries — must be confronted on many levels: education, enforcement and treatment.

The state stepped up the education part last week with a campaign called Change the Script, as part of the governor’s Connecticut Opioid REsponse (CORE) Initiative. The campaign aims to raise public awareness of the addiction risk with prescription opioids, and provide available treatments and community resources.

We agree with Governor Malloy that “it is a complex crisis that does not have one root cause, nor does it have simple solution, but we need to do everything in our power to treat and prevent it.”

A basic step is collecting solid data in the number of overdoses, as well as deaths, in the state.

If we can do it for chicken pox, we should do no less for opioid overdoses. The “someone” you know deserves to be counted.